s to
contend. In the first place, her engines, boilers, coal, etc., occupy
at least forty per cent of her total registered tonnage. Grant that
the additional expense of a steamer over a sail, that is, wages for
engineers, firemen, coal passers, etc., and finding the same in food
and rooms, costs even no more than the loss of an additional ten per
cent of her freight room. In other words, considering her steam
machinery, fuel, extra expenses, etc., to be equal to half of her
freight room, it is evident that she would carry only half as much
freight as a sailing vessel of the same size, and that she would get
but half as much money for it.

It is thus clear, I think, that there is a certain class of ocean
freights which steam can not transport under any conditions so long as
there are sailing vessels on the ocean; and in that class are
comprehended all the great standard and staple articles of the world,
constituting in sum seventeen twentieths of all the freight passing
upon the ocean. This being so, it is utterly idle to suppose that
steam in any form can take the place of sail upon the ocean, even
though the present prices for the carriage of standard articles should
increase three hundred per cent.

There are many considerations which affect this question. The ordinary
average passages of the ocean on long voyages are now very rapid; and
some of the clippers have attained a speed which no freighting steamer
may ever be expected to do on the high seas. They do not maintain this
high speed as an average, but it is sufficiently high for all of the
ordinary purposes of transport in the standard articles of commerce,
and where the business of the clipper is done by a fast mail steamer.
There is no positive necessity for the speedy transport that some have
attempted to give to articles, whose presence in the markets, as the
ordinary supplies of life, to-day, next month, or a month later, is a
matter of total indifference to every one except the ship-owner
himself. It but little concerns the public whether a cargo of cotton,
or beef or pork, or corn is one month or forty-five days between the
United States and England, so that it is safe in the end. It is an
annual production that must have an annual transit, and however
unnecessarily fast we may become, we can not send more than one crop
in the year. The world frequently becomes too fast in every thing; and
crises, panics, and bankruptcies follow as legitimate consequence